A dauntingly complete portrait of the one of the most powerful and significant figures in American journalism. Walter Winchell was all but forgotten at his death, but he created the modern gossip column and spearheaded the rise of the culture and cult of celebrity. Gabler (An Empire of Their Own, 1988) explains that Winchell uniquely understood that gossip ``was a weapon of empowerment for the reader and listener.'' Born to a Jewish family at the turn of the century, Winchell was an unlikely candidate for national power. After a childhood of Dickensian poverty, he escaped to vaudeville and then moved into journalism. Possessor of a slang-riddled prose style all his own, he was catapulted to fame covering Broadway for the Daily Graphic, a tabloid even more sleazy than any imagined in the mind of Rupert Murdoch. From there he moved to the slightly more legit Mirror, where he gradually switched from covering the demimonde of show folk and the night-clubbing rich to pontificating on national and local politics as a staunch New Dealer. But when FDR died, Winchell began an inexorable shift to the right, eventually falling in with the most scurrilous of red-baiters. A vindictive, selfish man, he died almost forgotten by the world of the famous that he had once terrorized. Gabler tells his rise-and-fall story in almost exhausting detail, recounting Winchell's constant feuding with colleagues and subjects, his army of sycophants, and his troubled family life. The result is alternately riveting and enervating, but Gabler makes a convincing case for Winchell's central role in the transformation of mass media in the middle years of the century. Clearly, the ghost of Walter Winchell is abroad in the land at a time when the O.J. Simpson preliminary hearings merit network coverage and a Supreme Court confirmation hearing does not. Gabler's book is timely, incisive and, for the most part, a good read.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41751-6
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.
A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that—by design—matters will never improve for African Americans.
To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, “slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic…[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power.” No other ethnic group—not Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americans—in the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through (“blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim…a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon”). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that “has secured a mandate from Black people at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper.”
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-614-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Flawed but poignant and often funny.
Comedian and Onion director of digital Thurston (Better Than Crying: Poking Fun at Politics, the Press & Pop Culture, 2003) delivers a “book about the ideas of blackness” in the guise of a helpful how-to guide to being black.
The author and a “Black Panel” made up of friends and colleagues, including one white person to avoid charges of reverse discrimination and also as a control group, ponder many questions about being black—e.g., “When did you first realize you were black?” and “Can you swim?” However, the humor does not serve the role of making light of race and racism, but rather as a gentle skewering that invites serious consideration of how black Americans are often limited by certain expectations concerning blackness. In “How to Speak for All Black People,” Thurston challenges the assumption that one black person can speak to the experience of an entire race, as well as the assumption that a black person can only speak to the black experience. In “How to Be the Black Employee,” he confronts the challenges of being hired both for the job and for being black—you will and must be, for instance, featured in every company photo. The humor does not always work; at times it is blog-like cleverness for the sake of cleverness (and is yet another joke about blacks needing white friends to get a cab really needed?). Thurston is at his best when he writes about his own life: growing up in Washington, D.C., attending Sidwell Friends School, matriculating at Harvard (“my experience of race at Harvard was full of joy and excitement”). The key to greater harmony is not necessarily seeing beyond race, but, as one Black Panelist puts it, to “see that and all of the things that I have done, to embrace all of me.”
Flawed but poignant and often funny.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-200321-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
